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Is democracy dead?
Dear Editor,
Democracy is dying in Canada. This is disturbing, but perhaps not surprising. What should be surprising (and even more disturbing!) is when the (free) media empower the agents of this process by failing to adequately inform the public of alternatives. This has been happening in mainstream Canadian media for years.
Last month, Canada’s sixth-largest federal political party was preparing to go to court to fight for the right to participate in the televised debates when it was announced that another party (Green) had been added to the roster. The broadcasters organizing the debates turned them down without offering any reason. For ten years, this party has been fighting to change the Elections Act to seriously consider the right of voters to be provided with adequate information about all options available to them. The Act actually focuses on the interests of the major parties, instead.
Democracy means having an informed electorate, in other words, making the public aware of the philosophies and policies of all registered parties. Limiting their information to only the biggest four or five actually impairs the democratic process. And what about the right of their hard-working candidates (already at a disadvantage due to limited funding) to make their policies known?
The Supreme Court of Canada’s 2003 Figueroa decision stresses the important role smaller parties play in the democratic process, even if they cannot offer what might be called “a government option,” by boldly and consistently raising the important issues the major parties may not want to discuss. That certainly applies to the party in question. It cannot be denied that their platform includes, in the words of their leader, “many issues the big parties would rather avoid, as well as fresh and innovative proposals for problems they’re still debating in old terms…One way that hurts democracy is that the people who might support those policies stay home and don’t vote, because they don’t know there’s any party that represents them.” The mainstream media failed to fulfill its role in our last election. Unfortunately, so did Mars’ Hill. I’m disappointed.
Francine VanWoudenberg
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Response:
In our post-colonial world, I know it is de-rigueur to root out and expose the ‘hidden voices.’ However, considering that the States is considered a strong democracy with two parties, I think that presenting four was more than adequate. We did cut number five, the BQ, since they don’t like us (personally, I feel), are determined to fracture Canada, and don’t print their propaganda in English. More compellingly, even number four has never elected an MP, so any votes for the sixth-largest party are, in all practicality, protest votes. And people who register protest votes are motivated enough to research where they want to throw their ballot. Therefore, letting more parties have their say in Mars’ Hill is just needless destruction of trees. Say we let number six have their say;what about the seventh-largest party? Do we want the Marxist-Leninist Party to have their say? Or the Marijuana party, perhaps? I’m personally a big fan of the Rhinoceros Party, but they didn’t get their say either, despite the fact I know Tony the Weasel. However, despite complaints about democratic suppression, just maybe the hidden voices were in fact hidden for a reason. The big schtick of every protest party exists within at least one party, so a much more proactive approach is to work within one of the parties for specific issues. Finally, citing the Supreme Court is not the best tactic. No party has an inherent right to be represented in print, especially when it gets less than half a percent of the vote.
– Ben Linkewich, I&I editor
“No party has an inherent right to be represented in print.” I would like to weigh in on this discussion, and this particular point seems to be a good place to start.
You know, Ben, there was another man who held similar views on that particular point. He was also able to eloquently present his reasoning on why certain points of view and organizations that presented those points of view should not be taken seriously or even given any ability to make those points of view known. This particular individual went on to write a book called “Mein Kempf”, and after that, he proceeded to slaughter six million people with whom he philosophically “disagreed”.
Let me be clear. I’m not calling you a totalitarian, or an advocate of Hitler, or a Nazi, or any other hateful individual. I’m sure you’re a very respectful person and I’m also sure that you believe that you are right to censor certain viewpoints. All I am saying is that when you, the Almighty Editor, begin to take it upon yourself to determine which viewpoints “deserve” coverage, and which do not, you have abandoned the basic principles of free speech, and even closer to home, your obligation to report objectively on issues you are presented with.
So, I beg your pardon, but when you say that no party has an inherent right to representation, you betray an ignorance about democracy, freedom of speech, and the meaning of either of those two processes.
With regrets,
The Mage
Dear Necromancer,
Well, it’s not every day I get compared to Hitler, but I’ll take it as a very backward compliment. I appreciate both that you can say anything after casting the cloud of anonymity (level 7) about you and that Hitler is one of the few ways left to break through postmodern relativism when talking about opinions.
You have several faulty premises in your critique of me, there being several arguments in there. The first is that I actually censored something by editing out parties smaller than the Bloc. An excellent team of writers wrote the articles about the four major parties we could vote for in BC. I did, in fact, write a piece on the BQ that was cut. Nobody offered to write on any other party.
Actually, with joy I would have written about the Libertarians, Marxists, and neo-Rhinos – they’re all dear to my heart. Yet we come to the second, more compelling faulty premise: we do not have infinite space in the paper. Thus, it is a necessary to realize the commonsensical and obvious: not all writings are of equal merit and applicability to the TWU community. It is no betrayal of objectivity to admit this: the contrary is a betrayal of objective truth. As the internet age has proven, information without filters becomes meaningless chaos.
Also, you blur a right of a political party to be published into freedom of speech. I have no problem with anyone shouting anything from the rooftops, even political propaganda. Freedom of speech means I will not beat up or arrest such people, despite any natural inclinations to that end; it does not obligate me to help them out. All parties are responsible for getting their own propaganda out, but the onus is most certainly on the very small parties to aggrandize themselves – their only real right is that they should not be persecuted for it.
Furthermore, I believe that is the organizations that ought not to be taken seriously, not the ideas themselves. The ideas themselves are worth taking very seriously. However, if you do take the ideas seriously, it follows that it is harmful to take the smaller parties seriously because virtually every view of the minor parties has representation in an element of one or more of the major parties. It is through these parties that actual change can occur, whereas registering a protest vote is quite literally a futile gesture. This is the somewhat unfortunate political reality, so it is my respect for the efficacy of populist democracy that drove this, nothing less. In all truth, I would like nothing better than for the issues brought forward by protest parties to be decided by the electorate.
Sincerely,
Ben
P.S. As an aside, you presume that a desire for censorship was the prime cause of brutality within tyranny. However, it is merely a political reality that opposition undermines power. ‘Good’ tyrants as well as bad censor. Thus it a necessary effect of every tyranny, not a cause. The evil is in the philosophy behind the tyranny. Desire for money and egotistical power gives us the Al-Qadhafis of the world. The worst tyrants, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, were that and much more: just like many both in his day and now, they combined atheistic materialism with the Progress myth. Neither aspect of this philosophy brooks the slightest opposition. The fact is that the few who have been willing to think through and capable of acting on this philosophy are necessarily brutal and dehumanizing because the philosophy itself is brutal and dehumanizing.
mage pwned